65 · The Swiss Barista

Who is the real slave, and who authentically freed their mind? The Swiss barista making £80k a year working thirty hours a week, travelling all around Europe, running a small online business, doing what they love on side quests? Or the Rockefeller family working a hundred hours a week, managing trillions, five-storey mansions, where every conversation is how to make more money? Which life is right? What does "right" even mean? Free from what?

My time in Manitoba showed me people who don't even know what status is — what it means to truly live with soul and love, what the actual manifestation of that looks like. It was a reminder of two things. If you are going to compete, go hard or go home. Second — don't forget to come home.

In a sense, realise that ambition is just all meaningless. Know that truth. You can chase worldly desires — but know that there is beauty in the world, and it has almost no correlation with the money you make. The soul's joy has absolutely nothing to do with it. Travel. You'll find out fast that life can and will be beautiful if you choose to relinquish worldly values and cherish love. But win first, and get out. Living life, travelling, experiencing, having fun — that's the real beauty.

There are tons of McDonald's workers in the world doing maths and intellectual explorations in their free time. They're broke, their parents are embarrassed by their social status, and these people can run laps around PhDs at Harvard. There are so many of them — hidden gems nobody knows about. Is it their fault they didn't outreach, or the world's fault for not providing the infrastructure for them to blossom? I don't know. Just some late-night yapping that stays with me.

A true G businessman respects even a lemonade stand that sells ten one-dollar cups, because that might be the next Tropicana or Sunkist.

Wild how some random Hispanic guy who can't speak proper English is printing $500k profit a month somewhere out there — and that's not even rare. For me, I just want a comfortable life travelling the world. For that, you need to find a problem in the world, solve it, and get paid — that's literally it. The prestige, the status — complete nonsense.

Why is it that people who have great lives seem to have less resistance? Everyone is wrong — that includes me and my parents. Nobody knows the ideal. What even is the ideal? Why are there twenty-year-old founders who dropped out of high school and built billion-dollar service businesses, while people in their sixties still work to make £2,000 a month in rent? When you come from certain backgrounds — even mine — there's an extreme bias toward struggle, pain, stress, the negative forces. I do think they help; I lean into that dark side too. But there is a massive abundance of people who became great, travelled the world, and had great lives. Don't fall for the assertive propaganda.

Whether you get the LSE offer or not — you don't need to go to Oxbridge to be someone. You could get a good job studying maths in Winnipeg and have a chill life in Austin, Texas. Both doors stay open, and knowing that is what makes walking through either one a choice instead of a sentence.